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Indeed, the history of AIDS in the U.S. may have a much longer prologue than was once suspected. "What we're saying is that AIDS has been around for a long time but just wasn't recognized," Elvin-Lewis explains. It is possible, Tulane's Garry speculates, that the AIDS virus mutated and became more lethal in the 1970s. To test that hypothesis, he plans to spend much of the next year or so attempting to reconstruct viral genes from Robert R.'s tissue. "We know that the virus was not epidemic in 1969, so we might be able to identify the changes between then and now that enabled it to spread," Garry says. If scientists can figure out how the AIDS virus might have changed, the puzzling case from the past might shed light on the future of the epidemic.